I recently came across an issue where an online application was crossing several domains during the customer experience, and the Google Analytics tracking was losing the referrer when they left the originating domain.

The usual Google Analytics tracking code is:

With the addition of two extra lines:

We can force each link to carry the cookie data over to the next domain, maintaining the user data throughout.

There is one other small change. Any href that transitions from one domain to the next has to include an onclick event that tells it to use a tracker method.

We need to do something similar to form submissions:

In this way the user cookie is maintained across multiple domains.

Everyone knew that Sony's big E3 announcement was going to be the new PSP Go. As per usual in these situations someone has leaked the specs online already.

• 3.8-inch display of unknown resolution
• 43 percent lighter than the current PSP-3000
• 16GB of flash memory
• Integrated Bluetooth with mobile phone tethering and BT headset support
• Memory Stick Micro slot
• New Gran Turismo, Little Big Planet and Metal Gear Solid games
• Full PlayStation Network support (TV and movie rentals/purchases) and integration with the PlayStation 3

I have an original psp (model 2000 I think) and it was a good little device. The only problem is that it has no USP. With the way that modern tech has converged it is basically a smartphone without the telephone capabilities. Sure it is good or movie playback, but the screen is almost identical to the iPhone or HTC Magic in terms of size, and now that they have remove the UMD drive its even less distanced from them.

I was recently working on an email application where users are sent emails on an automatic basis from the main web platform. There are many pitfalls to bulk email sending, and one of the oldest is how the email content will actually render in the users email client. Usually this is simply a case of people turning off images, or active scripting so they lose the majority of the design and layout.

Often people will include a 'Click here to view this online' link at the top of the email as a substitute, as it's much easier to control the how the content of a web page displays than an email.

A new pitfall (for me!) is Gmail. I found that sending exactly the same content to a hotmail account and a Gmail account resulted in two different displays!

The email is a three column layout, with both of the side columns being coloured to provide a bordered edging. In Hotmail it displayed as designed and tested, but in Gmail the third column was gone, and the central column had lost its shape and was overlapping the right area!

I eventually tracked down the error to an extra set of ending tags:

I spent a few hours looking for them at this point, but couldn't find them anywhere. After backtracking and examining the rest of the email (it is made of several component blocks) I discovered that there was a small table layout error in the code. This was causing G mail to attempt to fix it itself! It was reading through the code and interpreting the error and trying to correct it. It was writing in the end tags above itself, so I was never going to find them in a template!

So one to note for the future, G mail is strict about the code it renders, and will happily rewrite anything it doesn't like.